Thursday, November 03, 2005

Addictions to Stupid Games: Part 6

Today I'll talk about my 2nd most ridiculous addiction to a stupid game. This happens to be the current one as well. It is Free Cell. As many of you know, free cell is one of the 4 standard games that comes with Microsoft windows, along with hearts, minesweeper, and solitaire. Free cell is similar to solitaire and basically you have to move cards around and eventually get them in suited order Ace-King. What I love about free cell is that it keeps track of your wins, losses, current streak, and longest streak. And after playing a couple hundred games you can really figure out how to win the majority of them.

Free cell from Microsoft comes with about 32,000 different starting setups and these vary greatly in difficulty. In fact, one of the games, 11982, is impossible to solve. And then there are some games that you pretty much can't screw up. I've had a game where I didn't have to put any cards in the free cells at all!

So anyway, I started to get into the game awhile back and was pretty weak at first. After some time I was winning most of the games but my overall win percentage was pretty low because I had all those early losses from when I was learning. Finally, I decided to wipe the slate clean and start over to see how good I could do. There are ways to cheat, too, and I had been victim to that a few times in my first go around so I decided to play it totally fair once I cleared the statistics.